They have captured Rohan perfectly. The art and the music is incredible. It is all greens and browns, rolling hills, crystal streams.

My favorite part of the expansion so far is Volume III, Book 7 of the epic quest. I won’t spoil anything for you, but I’ll just say that this is the closest we’ve come to the Fellowship in a long, long time, and MadeOfLions and his team have done a great job of really bringing the story to life. It is probably the most immersive experience I’ve encountered so far in LOTRO.

This expansion really reminds you you are playing Lord of the Rings. It is lore central. Which leads me to the incredible job @MadeOfLions has done with the epic Book 7, which for me is the best book of them all.

I haven’t been this excited about an expansion release since Mines of Moria. It may be buggy still, but I absolutely am addicted to Mounted Combat. Rohan is an amazing, expansive region.

As someone who loves cosmetics and the cosmetic system, I am really overjoyed that my character can now dress up his horse to exactly fit his current outfit. You can mix and match blankets, head gear, back gear and leg gear and dye them in a lot of different colors, and then use different saddles as well as specify different colors for your horse’s coat and mane and tail to create the perfect horse for your current look.

The music is great. (Kudos to getting Chance Thomas back. The recycling of old zone music for Isengard was horrible and very low class. This, on the other hand, is very top notch. Bravo.)

The new mounted combat system is going to be the make or break part of the expansion. Beta testers mostly seemed to really like it, although people also noted that there was a learning curve and that since players are expected to level their new warmounts, there is a lot of grinding in the expansion. People also noted bugs and hoped that Turbine will be able to use the extra time before release to get those sorted out.

But mostly I wanted to highlight that amongst all the other MMOs being released this autumn, it may be that Turbine are onto a winner here and LOTRO players may want to check this one out when they have time.

Hope mounted combat is accessible without buying the expansion, reading comments on the forum it seems to be tied to quests outside of the epic books, so possibly not. Getting to try it out will be a big deciding factor in buying the expansion, unless they do a half-price deal on Black Friday again. Will have to look out for some videos in the next while. Customisation of the mounts appearance sounds great, plus a huge landscape to run around in, that’s what really attractive to me above all.

I didn’t preorder it, and it’s not in my plans. My fear is that the warmount thing becomes another legendary item fiasco, i.e. another endless leveling grind on top of the “normal” levels.
As much as I like the world of LotRO, I find myself resubscribing for a month and then dumping the game out of boredom, to go back to WoW. Fight in LotRO is laggy and I always have the feel I’m playing underwater, with my keypresses having an effet some long time in the future….. maybe.

I’m still trying to finish all the Isengard era content before the cap increases, so I don’t earn exp and end up over-level yet again. So for me, an extra month just makes my goal easier. More generally, any time a MMO publisher concedes the need for a delay, it’s almost certainly necessary.

I’m a beta tester and the new areas in the expansion are gorgeous. Turbine really went all out in the design.

I think the main reason they delayed was because they want mounted combat to be as near to perfect as possible. There seemed to be a bit of balance issues since some classes can hit harder while on foot than mounted which shouldn’t be the case. That is what they are working on. There are also some tweaks needed for the animations.

Mounted combat once you get the hang of it is really exciting. Especially galloping full blast across the huge landscapes.

Be assured that LOTRO’s mounted combat is nothing like the one used in Warcraft’s Lich King expansion. It is a lot more complicated.